SWOB: Swarm Intelligent Odour Based Routing for geographic wireless sensor network applications

For wireless sensor networks (WSN) involved in geographical surveillance type applications, obtaining information from a specified region of interest is important. The information itself is dependent upon the application type specific sensors deployed within the network region. For the purpose of this study we propose a new routing protocol called swarm intelligent odour based routing (SWOB) that uses network topology and geographic location information to coordinate effectively the routing tasks for information agents to traverse the network to the region of interest. SWOB applies the principles provided by social insects in odour localization. Using this natural principle SWOB uses a virtual Gaussian odour plume technique to describe the odour dispersion effects found in nature, allowing information agents in a distributed manner to be guided towards the region of interest effectively. Simulation results show the proposed scheme does indeed provide advantages on improving on latency by 98% and energy consumption performance by 75% when compared with basic flooding.